Conspiracy literature now seems to be settling into a nice routine, the mixing of genuine historic events with mixtures of speculation and outright fantasy. The fantasy starts with the name of the author of Mind Controllers, for for Armen Victorian' does not actually exist. He is the pen-name of Habib, aka Henry, Azadehdel, a Nottingham shop assistant and former insurance salesman, who clearly possesses many of the features of Caraboo syndrome, to the extent that it is doubtful whether any statements about his life and backgronnd can be assumed to accurate.

As Victorian, Henry originally set himself up as a UFO researcher, before going on to the more hopefully lucrative line as spy buster, which actually doesn't appear to have got him any closer into mainstream journalism, though he is taken seriously by some intelligence people who should know better.

As such things go Mind Controllers is on the more reasonable end of conspiracy theories. So we get, as I said, some real history, the CIA MKULTRA, and other real or alleged unethical experiments, which certainly suggest that the 'free world' had a fair number of psychopaths who would have operated the concentration camps quite effectively if history had turned out differently. But this is never enough; the enemy must not only be wicked, they must be enormously powerful and possessed of near supernatural secret technologies. Thus we get the tale of the Verney's and the dreadful noise which plagued them in their cottage. This, if not a figment of their imagination, and one can never be sureabout such things. It sounds like our old friend the humaduzz, but is interpreted as some hideous experiment by them. When Verney gets the run around from all sorts of local authorities, this is not because, rightly or wrongly, they have written him off as tiresome nutcase, but because they are in the plot.

We also get the tales of the CIA mind control experiments, the researches into psychotronics and remote viewing, the dastardly aviary and many other dark deeds. To the cynic all this suggests that the CIA and other intelligence organisations are staffed by people living every bit as much in a fantasy world of their own making as dear old Henry himself, expect that their craziness costs lots of money and in some cases suffering and lives.

And if you are really paranoid, you could ask yourself who really benefits from such a portrayal of power and mystique, If you were a CIA recruiter, what would you think would appeal to likely members; an image of a vast powerful organisation able to control people minds at a distance, engaged in remote viewing, anti-gravity research and hiding the secrets of crashed flying saucers, or a bunch of assholes who couldn't locate the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, because The Rough Guide to Belgrade in the office (... whoops, I'm sorry secret intelligence in Yugoslavia) was a few years out of date.

If Mind Controllers is the moderate end of this spectrum. Evil Agenda is the real crazy stuff. Here too real historical facts about the Nazis and Project Paperclip is interwoven with mad stuff the about the Bavarian Illuminati (apparently now official representatives of the Bavarian State Government it would seem) trying to run the world. Anti-fascist and fascist conspiracy theories become fused together. (No matter that the ideas of the real eighteenth century Illuminati, every bit as dangerous as Tom Paine, and the Nazis were diametrically opposed). This again is linked to essentially Nazi nostalgia myths of the survival of Adolf Hitler in his Antarctic Avalon, where he is surrounded by would be world conquering legions, and the proud possessors of flying saucers which landed on the moon in 1942! -- Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 63, May 1998.

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